HISTORY

Ragged Schooling

An article on ragged schooling that first
appeared in The Daily News in 1852. In it Charles Dickens
reflects on his visit to Field Lane Ragged School. ope this title

Dickens' encounter with ragged schooling made a
lasting impact upon him and is said to have been a significant element
in his writing of A Christmas Carol. Here we reproduce a piece
describing a visit to Field Lane Ragged School (Field Lane was
established in 1841 as a Ragged School and Sabbath School by a Christian
missionary. Field Lane [now replaced by Farringdon Road]. It was located
in an area of great poverty, (chosen by Charles Dickens as the setting
of Fagin's den).

* *
*

I offer no apology for entreating the attention of the readers of
The Daily News to an effort which has been making for some three
years and a half, and which is making now, to introduce among the most
miserable and neglected outcasts in London, some knowledge of the
commonest principles of morality and religion; to commence their
recognition as immortal human creatures, before the Gaol Chaplain
becomes their only schoolmaster; to suggest to Society that its duty to
this wretched throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully
begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless
maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world,
of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding
place for the hulks and jails: is horrible to contemplate.

This attempt is being made in certain of the most
obscure and squalid parts of the Metropolis, where rooms are opened, at
night, for the gratuitous instruction of all comers, children or adults,
under the title of 'Ragged Schools'. The name implies the purpose. They
who are too ragged, wretched, filthy, and forlorn, to enter any other
place: who could gain admission into no charity school, and who would be
driven from any church door; are invited to come in here, and find some
people not depraved, willing to teach them something, and show them some
sympathy, and stretch a hand out, which is not the iron hand of Law, for
their correction.

Before I describe a visit of my own to a Ragged
School, and urge the readers of this letter for God's sake to visit one
themselves, and think of it (which is my main object), let me say, that
I know the prisons of London well; that I have visited the largest of
them more times than I could count; and that the children in them are
enough to break the heart and hope of any man. I have never taken a
foreigner or a stranger of any kind to one of these establishments but I
have seen him so moved at sight of the child offenders, and so affected
by the contemplation of their utter renouncement and desolation outside
the prison walls, that he has been as little able to disguise his
emotion, as if some great grief had suddenly burst upon him. Mr.
Chesterton and Lieutenant Tracey (than whom more intelligent and humane
Governors of Prisons it would be hard, if not impossible, to find) know
perfectly well that these children pass and repass through the prisons
all their lives; that they are never taught; that the first distinctions
between right and wrong are, from their cradles, perfectly confounded
and perverted in their minds; that they come of untaught parents, and
will give birth to another untaught generation; that in exact proportion
to their natural abilities, is the extent and scope of their depravity;
and that there is no escape or chance for them in any ordinary
revolution of human affairs. Happily, there are schools in these prisons
now. If any readers doubt how ignorant the children are, let them visit
those schools and see them at their tasks, and hear how much they knew
when they were sent there. If they would know the produce of this seed,
let them see a class of men and boys together, at their books (as I have
seen them in the House of Correction for this county of Middlesex), and
mark how painfully the full grown felons toil at the very shape and form
of letters; their ignorance being so confirmed and solid. The contrast
of this labour in the men, with the less blunted quickness of the boys;
the latent shame and sense of degradation struggling through their dull
attempts at infant lessons; and the universal eagerness to learn,
impress me, in this passing retrospect, more painfully than I can tell.

For the instruction, and as a first step in the
reformation, of such unhappy beings, the Ragged Schools were founded. I
was first attracted to the subject, and indeed was first made conscious
of their existence, about two years ago, or more, by seeing an
advertisement in the papers dated from West Street, Saffron Hill,
stating "That a room had been opened and supported in that wretched
neighbourhood for upwards of twelve months, where religious instruction
had been imparted to the poor", and explaining in a few words what was
meant by Ragged Schools as a generic term, including, then, four or five
similar places of instruction. I wrote to the masters of this particular
school to make some further inquiries, and went myself soon afterwards.

* *
*
It was a hot summer night; and the air of Field Lane and Saffron Hill
was not improved by such weather, nor were the people in those streets
very sober or honest company. Being unacquainted with the exact locality
of the school, I was fain to make some inquiries about it. These were
very jocosely received in general; but everybody knew where it was, and
gave the right direction to it. The prevailing idea among the loungers
(the greater part of them the very sweepings of the streets and station
houses) seemed to be, that the teachers were quixotic, and the school
upon the whole "a lark". But there was certainly a kind of rough respect
for the intention, and (as I have said) nobody denied the school or its
whereabouts, or refused assistance in directing to it.

It consisted at that time of either two or three “I
forget which “miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house. In the
best of these, the pupils in the female school were being taught to read
and write; and though there were among the number, many wretched
creatures steeped in degradation to the lips, they were tolerably quiet,
and listened with apparent earnestness and patience to their
instructors. The appearance of this room was sad and melancholy, of
course “how could it be otherwise! “but, on the whole, encouraging.

The close, low chamber at the back, in which the
boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost
insupportable. But its moral aspect was so far worse than its physical,
that this was soon forgotten. Huddled together on a bench about the
room, and shown out by some flaring candles stuck against the walls,
were a crowd of boys, varying from mere infants to young men; sellers of
fruit, herbs, lucifer-matches, flints; sleepers under the dry arches of
bridges; young thieves and beggars “with nothing natural to youth about
them: with nothing frank, ingenuous, or pleasant in their faces;
low-browed, vicious, cunning, wicked; abandoned of all help but this;
speeding downward to destruction; and unutterably ignorant.

This, Reader, was one room as full as it could hold;
but these were only grains in sample of a Multitude that are perpetually
sifting through these schools; in sample of a Multitude who had within
them once, and perhaps have now, the elements of men as good as you or
I, and maybe infinitely better; in sample of a Multitude among whose
doomed and sinful ranks (oh, think of this, and think of them!) the
child of any man upon this earth, however lofty his degree, must, as by
Destiny and Fate, be found, if, at its birth, it were consigned to such
an infancy and nurture, as these fallen creatures had!

This was the Class I saw at the Ragged School. They
could not be trusted with books; they could only be instructed orally;
they were difficult of reduction to anything like attention, obedience,
or decent behaviour; their benighted ignorance in reference to the
Deity, or to any social duty (how could they guess at any social duty,
being so discarded by all social teachers but the gaoler and the
hangman!) was terrible to see. Yet, even here, and among these,
something had been done already. The Ragged School was of recent date
and very poor; but he had inculcated some association with the name of
the Almighty, which was not an oath, and had taught them to look forward
in a hymn (they sang it) to another life, which would correct the
miseries and woes of this.

The new exposition I found in this Ragged School, of
the frightful neglect by the State of those whom it punishes so
constantly, and whom it might, as easily and less expensively, instruct
and save; together with the sight I had seen there, in the heart of
London; haunted me, and finally impelled me to an endeavour to bring
these Institutions under the notice of the Government; with some faint
hope that the vastness of the question would supersede the Theology of
the schools, and that the Bench of Bishops might adjust the latter
question, after some small grant had been conceded. I made the attempt;
and have heard no more of the subject from that hour.

The perusal of an advertisement in yesterday's
paper, announcing a lecture on the Ragged Schools last night, has led me
into these remarks. I might easily have given them another form; but I
address this letter to you, in the hope that some few readers in whom I
have awakened an interest, as a writer of fiction, may be, by that
means, attracted to the subject, who might otherwise, unintentionally,
pass it over.

I have no desire to praise the system pursued in the
Ragged Schools; which is necessarily very imperfect, if indeed there be
one. So far as I have any means of judging of what is taught there, I
should individually object to it, as not being sufficiently secular, and
as presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties, to minds
not sufficiently prepared for their reception. But I should very
imperfectly discharge in myself the duty I wish to urge and impress on
others, if I allowed any such doubt of mine to interfere with my
appreciation of the efforts of these teachers, or my true wish to
promote them by any slight means in my power. Irritating topics, of all
kinds, are equally far removed from my purpose and intention. But, I
adjure those excellent persons who aid, munificently, in the building of
New Churches, to think of these Ragged Schools; to reflect whether some
portion of their rich endowments might not be spared for such a purpose;
to contemplate, calmly, the necessity of beginning at the beginning; to
consider for themselves where the Christian Religion most needs and most
suggests immediate help and illustration; and not to decide on any
theory or hearsay, but to go themselves into the Prisons and the Ragged
Schools, and form their own conclusions. They will be shocked, pained,
and repelled, by much that they learn there; but nothing they can learn
will be one-thousandth part so shocking, painful, and repulsive, as the
continuance for one year more of these things as they have been for too
many years already.

Anticipating that some of the more prominent facts
connected with the history of the Ragged Schools, may become known to
the readers of The Daily News through your account of the
lecture in question, I abstain (though in possession of some such
information) from pursuing the question further, at this time. But if I
should see occasion, I will take leave to return to it.

First published 13 March 1852, The Daily News

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